Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008)1 stresses on the fact that people feel the maximum satisfaction and pleasure not when they achieve a result easily, but more so when they need to stretch a little beyond their current comfort zone and take risk to accomplish a task that requires learning additional skills. Csikszentmihalyi calls this stage of experience, which many musicians and artists sometimes mention as the ‘zone’, as being in the flow, a stage that drives individuals to be creative and surpass their achievements. This paper attempts to bring in a basic understanding of what flow means in general and how one can apply it in one’s life as well as how organizations can take the concept of flow and leverage it with their employees in various situations.

Description

Flow is generally regarded as the state of mind in which a person doing any task is completely immersed in feelings of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the task. A ‘flow state’ is the experience of being fully engaged with what one is doing in that moment.

Flow is the result of many years of study conducted by Csikszentmihalyi. He and his associates have interviewed2 more than 1,000,000 people from all over the world. They found that whether it concerned teenagers in Tokyo, steelworkers in Gary, Indiana, farmers in Northern Italy or fishermen in Korea, people report that they most often achieve a form of happiness (a state of flow) when they pursue attainable but challenging goals—at work.

Keywords

Soft Skills Journal,Skill Versus Challenge Graph of Flow ,The Feelings During Flow , How to Get to Being in Flow, The Components of Flow.